Total situational awareness since 2004.

August 10, 2006

New Feature

So... blogger Matt Freeman and I have started working on a play together. It is based on the short story The Shadow by Hans Christen Andersen. It's one of his darker children's tale, about a writer who sets his shadow free on a whim one day, only to be reunited with the shadow (now posing as a human) later in life, to increasingly disasterous consequences. You can read a public domain version of the story here. Matt and I are working with a newer translation published a couple of years ago.

I have wanted to adapt The Shadow for the stage for some time. There's just one problem. Outside of Rapid Response Team work, I'm no writer. So I approached Matt, after having read a few of his plays, thinking he had the right sensibility to adapt the work. He really loved the material, and agreed to adapt it.

I really like bringing projects to writers. I'm not a writer, and I know it. At the same time, I really like having a very open collaborative process, and working together on a work. Bringing a project to someone enables this process nicely. I don't consider this project "mine" in any way. I also don't consider it "Matt's". It's ours. And that's pretty cool. We're both essential to it happening, which isn't always true in writer-director relationships. This is my second opportunity to do this. The other was with redbird, the second play I did in NYC.

Anyway... so Matt and I met and he's starting to churn out pages, and we were e-mailing back and forth about them, just kinda riffing and he suggested that we start to document our collaboration on our blogs, really open the whole thing up. I thought this was a great idea. So here's the first step... and introduction from my end. I'll let matt do his, and then we'll start to take it from there.

I hope you enjoy it.

UPDATE:
(Matt's first entry... along with a link to the translation he's using is here. He gets the ball rolling by asking you, dear reader, what you think of the tale. Let me echo this... what do you, dear reader, think of the story?)